By. Pelumi Olajengbesi Esq.
Nigeria is gradually becoming a society dangerously comfortable with pain and human suffering. The country is slowly drifting backwards into a brutal age where life is becoming short, uncertain, cruel, and frighteningly cheap. A nation once built on hope and communal humanity is gradually losing its moral sensitivity, while fear, bloodshed, and despair now compete daily with entertainment for public attention.
Last night, the world of sports stood still in celebration over Arsenal. Across Nigeria, despite pains, hunger, hardship, insecurity, and economic exhaustion, millions joined the frenzy. It was another “normal” night in a country bleeding from every part of its existence.
But somewhere in Oyo State, a family was thrown into darkness, anguish, and irreversible pain. The family of Michael Oyedokun was not celebrating. They were mourning. They were confronted with the unbearable reality that their loved one had been brutally murdered and beheaded in a country that increasingly appears incapable of protecting its own citizens. At that moment, nothing mattered except grief, fear, confusion, and unbearable pain.
This is the tragedy of Nigeria, a country where celebration and sorrow now coexist side by side in terrifying proportions. A country where some citizens laugh while others bury their loved ones abandoned by the very system established to protect them. A country where insecurity, violence, poverty, injustice, and institutional failure have become recurring realities of everyday life.
Yet, as a people, we still struggle to confront the painful truth that the Nigerian problem is fundamentally a failure of leadership, governance, and national conscience. Even more disturbing is the fact that many leaders still behave as though tragedy belongs only to ordinary people. But the frightening truth remains that Nigeria can fail anybody.
In Nigeria, tragedy can arrive without warning. One moment, a person is alive with dreams, responsibilities, ambitions, and hope. The next moment, that life becomes another headline, another viral story, another temporary outrage in a nation already overwhelmed by too many unresolved crises.
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of all this is how quickly society moves on. Another football match will come. Another political debate will trend. Another social media controversy will dominate public attention. Another scandal will replace the last one. But for the family left behind, life may never truly return to normal again.
Nigeria needs healing. Not just economic healing or political healing, but moral, emotional, and institutional healing. We are gradually becoming a society losing its sensitivity to pain, where bloodshed no longer shocks people deeply enough and where citizens increasingly live under fear, uncertainty, hopelessness, and emotional exhaustion.
There is something profoundly wrong with a nation where people no longer feel protected by the institutions created to defend them. There is something dangerously broken about a society where human life no longer carries the dignity and value it deserves.
We cannot continue to normalise violence, insecurity, bloodshed, and the collapse of public trust. We cannot continue to treat these tragedies as ordinary incidents citizens should simply accept as part of national life. A nation that no longer values human life cannot genuinely progress.
Nigeria desperately needs leaders with conscience, institutions that function effectively, security agencies that are proactive and accountable, and a justice system that is swift, visible, and dependable. Above all, we must rebuild compassion as a people, because when citizens become emotionally disconnected from the pain of others, humanity itself slowly begins to die.
Pelumi Olajengbesi, Esq., a legal practitioner, writes from Abuja.
